Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939The first International Women’s Day was celebrated in Copenhagen in 1910 and adopted by the Bolsheviks in 1913 as a means to popularize their political program among factory women in Russia. By 1918, Women’s Day had joined May Day and the anniversary of the October Revolution as the most important national holidays on the calendar. Choi Chatterjee analyzes both Bolshevik attitudes towards women and invented state rituals surrounding Women’s Day in Russia and the early Soviet Union to demonstrate the ways in which these celebrations were a strategic form of cultural practice that marked the distinctiveness of Soviet civilization, legitimized the Soviet mission for women, and articulated the Soviet construction of gender. Unlike previous scholars who have criticized the Bolsheviks’ for repudiating their initial commitment to Marxist feminism, Chatterjee has discovered considerable continuity in the way that they imagined the ideal woman and her role in a communist society. Through the years, Women’s Day celebrations temporarily empowered women as they sang revolutionary songs, acted as strong protagonists in plays, and marched in processions carrying slogans about gender equality. In speeches, state policies, reports, historical sketches, plays, cartoons, and short stories, the passive Russian woman was transformed into an iconic Soviet Woman, one who could survive, improvise, and prevail over the most challenging of circumstances. |
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abortion agitatora Aleksandra Aleksandra Kollontai Artiukhina backwardness Bolshevik bourgeois campaign collectivization Communist countryside crèches cultural Despite discourse dniu domestic factory February Revolution feminists Fenia festive figures film find first Five-Year Plan fulfill GARF gender holiday husband industry Inessa Armand institutions International Women’s Day istorii kolkhoz Kollontai Kommunistka Krest’ianka Krupskaia Kudelli labor Lenin Leningrad male March Maria marta Mezhdunarodnyi zhenskii Mezhraiontsy modern Moscow mother Obshchestvennitsa October Revolution officer official Okhrana organizations participation party peasant women Petersburg Petrograd plays pokhod police political popular Pravda public sphere rabote rabotnits Rabotnitsa revoliutsii revolutionary RGASPI ritual Russian Samoilova Sbornik sexual significance Social Democrats socialist society Soviet heroines Soviet propaganda Soviet Union Soviet women stakhanovites Stalin Stalinist story textile Theater theme tion trade unions trans Trud tsarist viet village VTsSPS Vyborg woman question women workers Women’s Day celebrations Women’s Day meeting women’s liberation York Zhenotdel Zhenshchiny